Saturday, October 03, 2009

A Birthday Story.

It was in the late 80s. Jim and I had just arrived in Los Angeles. We moved here because we weren't getting work on the east coast, and he had a lot of contacts from his days out here writing for Sid & Marty Krofft.

We didn't really have much in the way of money, so we were living in a flophouse which used to be a glamorous Hollywood high rise on Franklin and Cahuenga, which was dusty, noisy and filled with old furniture. We lived on the second floor overlooking Cahuenga, facing west. In the late afternoon, with no A/C, it was gas fumes, horn honks and dust. Lots and lots of dust.

I was anxious to do something in L.A. that involved music. The place suggested for me was the National Academy of Songwriters. A friend said, "Just show up and volunteer. Best way to learn the business." There, I introduced myself as a wayward ex-Gospel singer / Neil Young lover turned rock musician turned musical director for a lounge act turned piano bar singer.

They put me on the front desk answering phones.

One day, the managing director, Dan Kirkpatrick, a guitarist from Kansas, told me a friend of his, a TV producer who made it big with "Married With Children," was looking for a musical director for a club act, one night only, and would I want the gig? I said sure.

The Producer, a woman, had a dear friend who was dying of AIDS. He had one last wish before going out. A fantasy he had harbored his entire life:

To sing and perform a night club act.

The Producer told him she would make it happen. So, she hired me to put together his act. Also, a band of musicians (who all turned out to be straight, but called themselves The Nancy Boys).

AIDS was all around me, but since I had been an itinerant musician up until the day I met Jim aboard the Galileo on that fateful trip out of New York, I hadn't been really touched by it. All my college friends were Baptists and I had long left them behind. And in Dallas, where I came out, I had left before the plague hit and had spent most of those years living hotel room to hotel room, gig to gig.

If my friends back in Dallas were dying, there was no way to know.

Meeting The Star that night, where we had a lavish feast from Pollo Loco, I was anxious because a lot was at stake. I could tell he was sick. But he was headstrong. His goal was to make this the biggest night of his life.

I could just imagine how many years he must have put in, in front of the mirror. He had expectations that this would be his vindication. This would be the greatest show ever conceived.

He had chosen nearly every song in the American Songbook for inclusion in the show. It was gonna run about five hours long. So, my first job with him was editing. Every song we pulled was like driving a dagger deeper and deeper into his "last big moment on earth" finale. But I knew he wouldn't have been able to sustain a show like that. And I was right.

As we rehearsed, I could tell he wasn't really a performer. His ambitious show was overwhelming him. There came a time in the process where eliminating a song was an act of mercy and I could see the sense of relief wash over him as he let himself be talked out of this song or that song.

I took my role very seriously. I had to weigh what he was fantasizing against what was possible. I would not let him get up there and make a fool of himself.

Finally, the big night arrives.

The Nancy Boys, who I had just met, were setting up. The venue was a New York style piano bar with a big room, where people sat at tables, though I think they might have cleared out the tables to accommodate the crowd. Everyone had come to see him.

And then I get a phone call.

He's too sick to go on.

His body had finally started failing and he was too weak to stand. "He wants you to go on," The Producer told me over the phone.

"To what?"

"You have to go on in his stead and sing the songs he would have sung. Do his act! This is his request."

I have to sing his program and, what, be him? Say a few words about him? Are any of the attendees really coming tonight to "enjoy" a night on the town, a fun-filled evening of show tunes, frolic and laughs? No. They're coming because they love him and they want to see him.

Why would any of them even remotely care to listen to me sing? They don't know me. Honestly, I felt embarrassed. But it was his wish. He was insisting. He wanted them to have a party and he was supplying the party.

By now, the band has set up and we're ready to go. I start scanning on the music, trying to remember the lyrics so that I don't have to do the night with my head pointed down. But, worse, this isn't my music. Sure, I've done some piano bars, but this is Liza stuff. Barbra stuff. I don't sing this!

I can't remember much after that except that I think he drifted in at some point during the night, wrapped in blankets, sitting there watching me do his show.

I never felt so out of place in my life. Every move felt like the wrong move. Like an overweight girl in a narrow room full of glass figurines. Every word out of my mouth, "He said he wanted to sing this for you..." felt clumsy, awkward and leaden.

And this ghost of a person watching me use his toothpaste and wear his clothes and kiss his date.

But I finished his show with a big smile on my face. I know that, on the outside, I was cool and present and uplifting and gracious because everyone said I was. But, on the inside, I felt this dead numbness of not knowing what truck just hit me.

I was an impersonator of a person I had never seen perform. A person with AIDS. A person dying of AIDS.

I know I was thinking of him when I was writing the songs for The Last Session. My original idea was that I would gather all my friends at the Hollywood Roosevelt and just give myself one last concert.

And the great miracle of that night was that it actually happened. Except it wasn't a concert; it was a musical. And that was me at the piano. I was coughing and hacking, but I did it.

But in the back of my mind, no matter where or when I sing, I will always think of that guy who had dreamed his whole life to have his own night club act -- but who had to watch someone else do it.

So, guess what I'm getting for my birthday tomorrow?

Yep. A house. A piano. And a bunch of people who have to listen to me sing.

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ABOUT STEVE

I'm a small town singer/songwriter living in New York City who's mostly unknown. However, I was featured recently in the NY Times and on BBC World News and I just did my first major presentation in years, at the World Domination Summit 2013. Watch the video here.

I was supposed to die, but I wrote a musical instead: The Last Session. That's why I call my life "Living in the Bonus Round." The healing songs from that show set me on a worldwide adventure that is still unfolding. And this blog has created a community of caregivers who seem to want to keep me alive.

I have been open about my HIV/AIDS positive status, blogging about it since March of 1996, before blogs were invented and it continues. My health is strong, but it can fall apart easily. So, I mostly stay close to home, eating as well as I can, and making music wherever anyone will have me.

MORE:

As I said, the Original Diary, which is still online, and which continues in blog form here, was a daily report: a "watch me die online" diary played out in real time, which was intended for my friends and family, and my doc, who wanted me to keep track of symptoms.

As we approached May of 1997, I was failing, eventually hooked up to feeding tubes. I had weeks left to live, if that. And I was telling the whole story online, which nobody had ever really done before because the Internet was so new, nobody had really done anything on it yet except make flashing buttons and other zowie graphics.

Because I was too sick at the time to do much else, the diary gave me a chance to just tell everything that was going on with me. To make me feel not so alone. But still, I was dying. I didn't say that out loud, but that's what was happening.

And then, by chance -- because my name was picked in a lottery for a new medication -- I did not die and The Death Watch became the Bonus Round -- that little extra time you get at the end of a show to go for broke and win all the prizes.

A year later, packed with those original songs I wrote just to keep me alive, The Last Session was playing Off-Broadway to glorious reviews, but it didn't really make me famous. Chances are you never heard of it. But I got to do some AIDS education concerts for awhile, until all the funding dried up. And the requests.

This, in 2012, a weird thing happened. A guy who saw it back in 1997 contacted me, saying how he had vowed back then that if he ever became a producer, this would be his show. And he produced it in a small run in London and that has begat a cast album, which will be out soon on JAY Records. But the London critics went bloody crazy rediscovering my songs.

Too bad I wasn't dead. It would have made the greatest headlines of all: Dead Genius Songwriter Rediscovered. What would he have been capable of if he had lived??

Then, in 2013, because of one of those little AIDS education concerts I did in Memphis in 1998, because some guy saw me, I get an invitation to play at the thing called the World Domination Summit to 3000 motivated artists and activists and writers and etceteras.

Living in the Bonus Round began as one dying man's cry to be noticed, became a community of caregivers and is what would have happened if I hadn't died.

Living in the Bonus Round: where time speeds up and the prizes are better.

My latest project is refashioning "New World Waking" from its concert hall size into an experimental "crowd-sourced event" suitable as a school/church/community project that focus on redemptive non-violence, using real life examples of people who were victims of bullying or other forms of violence. People I met here on the Internet.

I wrote it after I got to play John Lennon's "Imagine" piano because I met Gabi Clayton online, and then wrote and sang the story of her son, who committed suicide after a gay bashing. Then, somehow, George Michael heard about it, and the next day they were filming us:

I also donate my time as the Tenor in the back row and Resident Composer at Christ Church Bay Ridge, Episcopal church, which gives me a chance to learn from one of the great musical directors/musicians in New York, Mark Janas.

Though my primary work, today, is in theater, concert or cabaret stage, I'm really just a simple balladeer, at heart and am likely to sing in a hospice as a huge auditiorium. I'm pretty much the same, whether you put me in a tux or overalls.

The healing power of music is what I believe in.

SONGS:

If you're looking for material for your group, whether civic or religious, I got songs for you! Inspirational music suitable for any kind of campfire event, secular or religious. Easy to learn. With strong, emotional messages of thankfulness, courage and feeling reborn.

You can find these pieces at Watchfire Music. You can download sheet music to my songs as well as recorded demos to help those who don't read that well.

NEWS: Steve has been honored with the first Broadway World 2015 Special Editor's Award for Excellence in Songwriting by BroadwayWorld,com. Here is their description:

In a field with many deserving candidates, this year's first ever BWW New York Cabaret Award for "Excellence in Songwriting" goes to Steve Schalchlin, a New York-based composer and lyricist who has been on quite a cabaret roll the past two years. Although his two biggest recent projects, the CD and subsequent show, Tales From the Bonus Round, and his song cycle, New World Waking, were years in development, Schalchlin performed both in New York over the past couple of seasons.

Bonus Round-which featured Schalchlin at the piano as lead singer--was performed as a cabaret show at the Metropolitan Room in October 2013 (and received a BWW Award nomination for "Best CD Release," and one of the songs garnered a nomination for "Best Original Song for a Cabaret Show"), while New World Waking received a standing ovation when performed at the Urban Stages Winter Rhythms Festival last month.

"What makes Steve stand out above the rest for his recent body of work is that he not only writes both music and lyrics, but also performs his songs," says BWW New York Cabaret Editor Stephen Hanks.

"But even more impressive is that his songs in Bonus Round compellingly chronicled his battle with the life-threatening AIDS disease, while New World Waking offered important messages about how our planet needs to finally overcome violence, war, racism, and prejudice-and how it might be possible through the power of music.

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